Triangle (2009 film)
Encyclopedia
Triangle is a 2009 British
-Australian
psychological horror film
, directed by Christopher Smith
, and starring Melissa George
, Rachael Carpani
and Liam Hemsworth
. It is set in the Bermuda Triangle
. The film was released in the UK on 16 October 2009.
) is a single mother to Tommy (Joshua McIvor), who is autistic. Encouraged by her friend, Greg (Michael Dorman
), to take some time for herself, she joins him and his friends for a day of sailing. Soon, they get caught in a freak electrical storm which capsizes their boat, forcing them to seek refuge on a passing ocean liner. Once on board, they realize that the ship is empty. Jess, however, feels that she has been there before.
As the group of five explores the ship further, strange things begin to happen. Jess comments on having an incredible, constant sense of deja vu, footsteps are heard in the halls, Jess' keys are found dropped on the floor and blood trails are seen on the floor. A masked figure stalks the group while Jess attempts to piece together the unfolding mystery as well as survive. One by one the members of the group are killed until finally there is only Jess, who faces off against the figure, culminating in her throwing the person overboard.
After the masked figure falls in the water, the ship passes by the capsized yacht with the original five members of the group in the exact same position as they had been earlier. Jess watches the group board and the events play out the same way they did before. Jess discovers that they are trapped in a time loop
, and tries to stop the masked figure again (who is Jess from an earlier time loop) by changing causality. However, her friends still die, and it is revealed that this "choice" was merely the effect of a secondary cycle (as evidenced by multiple corpses of her friends dying in the "new" manner)
Jess figures out that the time loop resets when everyone is dead after observing a past version of herself throwing the masked figure overboard. Deciding the only way to save her friends is to stop them from getting on the boat, thus she must kill all their present counterparts in order to have the loop repeat itself. However, when events play out the same way again, she falls overboard when the new version of herself attacks her, and wakes up on a beach near home.
Jess reaches home and sees herself and her son. Sequences are shown that were not shown in the first instance of this scene, portraying Jess as a bad mother, verbally and physically abusing her son. Jess is disgusted at how she used to treat her son, and kills the Past Jess in order to take her place. Thinking it best to get out of town, she heads off with her son in back and the body in the trunk. She hits and kills a seagull, and after one of Tommy's outbursts, decides to throw it into a nearby ditch. Here she discovers many other seagull corpses, revealing that she is still caught in the time loop. When her attention is diverted, she accidentally sideswipes a truck, causing her car to flip over, killing her son.
Jess, in shock, loses most of her recent memories. A taxi driver approaches, and, with condolences, offers to take her somewhere else. She leaves with him to go to the harbour to meet up with Greg and the group: beginning the cycle again.
. The UK Film Council
awarded public money from the National Lottery fund towards the development, production and distribution of the film, in eight awards totalling just under £1.5 million.
reports an 81% acceptable "fresh". Empire
gave the film a 4/5 stars rating, and called it a "satisfying mind-twister, with an unexpectedly poignant pay-off".
Variety
said that Triangle only makes some kind of sense on its own fantastic level. Time Out reviewer Nigel Floyd praises Melissa George
's "fearless, credible performance" that "grounds the madness in a moving emotional reality." The Guardian
critic, Philip French
compared it to a "Möbius strip
" in which the viewer "wonders how Smith will keep things going" and adds the viewer will "leave his picture suitably shaken." Fellow Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw
remarked Triangle is a "smart, interestingly constructed scary movie", complimenting Smith for "creating some real shivers."
Less impressed was Entertainment Ireland's Mike Sheridan, who does praise George's "fine committed performance, but that can't shield the fact that this still an exceptionally non-scary horror, that will have you scratching your head more than jumping out of your seat," ultimately rating it 2/5 stars.
Triangle was highly praised by The Movie Spot, giving it a 4.5 out of 5, saying "It throws everything it can to mess with you and twist what you are seeing around you." Horror review site Bloodydisgusting.com gave it 6/10 mostly praising its craftsmenship but faulting its supposed obscurity.
on 27 August 2009. Triangle was theatrically released on 16 October 2009, in the UK; 30 December 2009 in Belgium; 21 January 2010 in the Netherlands.
Triangle was critically successful but was not a commercial success. Debuting at 217 theaters in the UK, the film grossed £260,626 on its opening weekend, resulting into a number seven debut in the top 10. The following week, the film fell to number 11. As of 25 October 2009, the film has a domestic gross of £548,903.
and Blu-ray Disc
in the UK, with a release date of 1 March 2010.
Cinema of the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry...
-Australian
Cinema of Australia
Cinema of Australia, more commonly referred to as the Australian film industry, refers to the system of production, distribution, and exhibition of films in Australia. Film production commenced in Australia in 1906 with the production of The Story of the Kelly Gang, the earliest feature film made...
psychological horror film
Psychological horror
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that relies on character fears, guilt, beliefs, eerie sound effects, relevant music and emotional instability to build tension and further the plot...
, directed by Christopher Smith
Christopher Smith (director)
Christopher Smith, is a British film director and screenwriter.- Career :His four most prominent pieces of work are Creep, Severance, Triangle and Black Death. Smith was last working on a movie based about the UK children's book series CHERUB...
, and starring Melissa George
Melissa George
Melissa Suzanne George is an Australian film and television actress who has worked in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Melissa is perhaps best known for her role as Angel Parrish on the Australian soap opera Home and Away...
, Rachael Carpani
Rachael Carpani
Rachael Ann Carpani is an Australian actress.-Biography:Carpani grew up on a property near Dural, in Sydney's Hills district. She studied acting at the Australian College of Entertainment at Macquarie University and at the Drama Works Drama Company...
and Liam Hemsworth
Liam Hemsworth
Liam Hemsworth is an Australian actor. He took the role of Josh Taylor in the soap opera Neighbours and as "Marcus" on the children's television series The Elephant Princess and appeared in the American film The Last Song, released on 31 March 2010...
. It is set in the Bermuda Triangle
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels allegedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances....
. The film was released in the UK on 16 October 2009.
Plot
Jess (Melissa GeorgeMelissa George
Melissa Suzanne George is an Australian film and television actress who has worked in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Melissa is perhaps best known for her role as Angel Parrish on the Australian soap opera Home and Away...
) is a single mother to Tommy (Joshua McIvor), who is autistic. Encouraged by her friend, Greg (Michael Dorman
Michael Dorman
Michael Dorman is a New Zealand actor based in Australia, best known for his work on the television series, The Secret Life of Us and his supporting work in such acclaimed films as Suburban Mayhem and West.-Filmography:...
), to take some time for herself, she joins him and his friends for a day of sailing. Soon, they get caught in a freak electrical storm which capsizes their boat, forcing them to seek refuge on a passing ocean liner. Once on board, they realize that the ship is empty. Jess, however, feels that she has been there before.
As the group of five explores the ship further, strange things begin to happen. Jess comments on having an incredible, constant sense of deja vu, footsteps are heard in the halls, Jess' keys are found dropped on the floor and blood trails are seen on the floor. A masked figure stalks the group while Jess attempts to piece together the unfolding mystery as well as survive. One by one the members of the group are killed until finally there is only Jess, who faces off against the figure, culminating in her throwing the person overboard.
After the masked figure falls in the water, the ship passes by the capsized yacht with the original five members of the group in the exact same position as they had been earlier. Jess watches the group board and the events play out the same way they did before. Jess discovers that they are trapped in a time loop
Time loop
A time loop or temporal loop is a common plot device in science fiction in which time runs normally for a set period but then skips back like a broken record. When the time loop "resets", the memories of most characters are reset...
, and tries to stop the masked figure again (who is Jess from an earlier time loop) by changing causality. However, her friends still die, and it is revealed that this "choice" was merely the effect of a secondary cycle (as evidenced by multiple corpses of her friends dying in the "new" manner)
Jess figures out that the time loop resets when everyone is dead after observing a past version of herself throwing the masked figure overboard. Deciding the only way to save her friends is to stop them from getting on the boat, thus she must kill all their present counterparts in order to have the loop repeat itself. However, when events play out the same way again, she falls overboard when the new version of herself attacks her, and wakes up on a beach near home.
Jess reaches home and sees herself and her son. Sequences are shown that were not shown in the first instance of this scene, portraying Jess as a bad mother, verbally and physically abusing her son. Jess is disgusted at how she used to treat her son, and kills the Past Jess in order to take her place. Thinking it best to get out of town, she heads off with her son in back and the body in the trunk. She hits and kills a seagull, and after one of Tommy's outbursts, decides to throw it into a nearby ditch. Here she discovers many other seagull corpses, revealing that she is still caught in the time loop. When her attention is diverted, she accidentally sideswipes a truck, causing her car to flip over, killing her son.
Jess, in shock, loses most of her recent memories. A taxi driver approaches, and, with condolences, offers to take her somewhere else. She leaves with him to go to the harbour to meet up with Greg and the group: beginning the cycle again.
Production
The film was written and directed by Christopher SmithChristopher Smith (director)
Christopher Smith, is a British film director and screenwriter.- Career :His four most prominent pieces of work are Creep, Severance, Triangle and Black Death. Smith was last working on a movie based about the UK children's book series CHERUB...
. The UK Film Council
UK Film Council
The UK Film Council was set up in 2000 by the Labour Government as a non-departmental public body to develop and promote the film industry in the UK. It was constituted as a private company limited by guarantee governed by a board of 15 directors and was funded through sources including the...
awarded public money from the National Lottery fund towards the development, production and distribution of the film, in eight awards totalling just under £1.5 million.
Critical
Triangle was well-received critically, prior to and after it was released. Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reports an 81% acceptable "fresh". Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
gave the film a 4/5 stars rating, and called it a "satisfying mind-twister, with an unexpectedly poignant pay-off".
Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
said that Triangle only makes some kind of sense on its own fantastic level. Time Out reviewer Nigel Floyd praises Melissa George
Melissa George
Melissa Suzanne George is an Australian film and television actress who has worked in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Melissa is perhaps best known for her role as Angel Parrish on the Australian soap opera Home and Away...
's "fearless, credible performance" that "grounds the madness in a moving emotional reality." The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
critic, Philip French
Philip French
Philip French is a British film critic and former radio producer.French, the son of an insurance salesman, was educated at the direct grant Bristol Grammar School, read Law at Oxford University. and post graduate study in Journalism at Indiana University, Bloomington on a scholarship.He has been...
compared it to a "Möbius strip
Möbius strip
The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It can be realized as a ruled surface...
" in which the viewer "wonders how Smith will keep things going" and adds the viewer will "leave his picture suitably shaken." Fellow Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw is a British writer and film critic. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he was President of Footlights.Bradshaw is a film critic for The Guardian...
remarked Triangle is a "smart, interestingly constructed scary movie", complimenting Smith for "creating some real shivers."
Less impressed was Entertainment Ireland's Mike Sheridan, who does praise George's "fine committed performance, but that can't shield the fact that this still an exceptionally non-scary horror, that will have you scratching your head more than jumping out of your seat," ultimately rating it 2/5 stars.
Triangle was highly praised by The Movie Spot, giving it a 4.5 out of 5, saying "It throws everything it can to mess with you and twist what you are seeing around you." Horror review site Bloodydisgusting.com gave it 6/10 mostly praising its craftsmenship but faulting its supposed obscurity.
Distribution
The film premiered in the UK at the London FrightFest Film FestivalLondon FrightFest Film Festival
FrightFest is an annual film festival held in central London over the August Bank Holiday weekend. The first event was held in the year 2000....
on 27 August 2009. Triangle was theatrically released on 16 October 2009, in the UK; 30 December 2009 in Belgium; 21 January 2010 in the Netherlands.
Triangle was critically successful but was not a commercial success. Debuting at 217 theaters in the UK, the film grossed £260,626 on its opening weekend, resulting into a number seven debut in the top 10. The following week, the film fell to number 11. As of 25 October 2009, the film has a domestic gross of £548,903.
Home media
Icon Home Entertainment distributed Triangle through standard DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
and Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
in the UK, with a release date of 1 March 2010.
External links
at Icon Entertainment InternationalIcon Productions
Icon Productions LLC is an American independent production company founded in August 1989 by actor/director Mel Gibson and Australian producing partner Bruce Davey.-History:Icon started when Gibson was having trouble in financing the 1990 film Hamlet...
- Official soundtrack site at MovieScore MediaMovieScore MediaMovieScore Media is a Swedish record label devoted to original film scores, founded in 2005 by former film music journalist Mikael Carlsson. The label is the main business activity of Carlsson's company, MovieScore Media Sweden....
- "Triangle" Site at PreparedToBeScared.com